3.18.2013

On Tuesday March 5th, 2013, Karen Hannah of Zumbar Press and Nick Sarno of Press Works on Paper hosted an evening of poetry celebrating the publication of Emily Abendroth's EXCLOSURES, a broadbook (broadside + chapbook): "This 6-page,
hand-sewn book is printed in duotone and it dialogues with both worn and damaged
type, along with new, never-before-used type, textually exploring a number of
different themes through these fonts" (Zumbar).
Brian Teare's Albion Books, released EXCLOSURES 1-8 in 2012. I am a big fan of Emily's work and noted EXCLOSURES 1-8 as one of my 2012 bests on Michael Cross's 2012 Disinhibitions. Abendroth's diction is always juicy and her syntax elastic, tensile. Additionally, she is a fabulous reader of her work.

Francois Luong and I had the opportunity to read with Emily for a lovely and attentive crowd in the very fabulous Press Works on Paper bookstore in the Mission at 3108 24th Street. This bookstore specializes in art, fashion, and poetry classics. Plus they carry pencils to lust after.

Serendipitously, each of us read work that rhymed in terms of concerns, inspiration, and diction. I read some new small poems written to the accompaniment of bird calls from the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds and some of the sections from an ongoing work in progress tentatively called "after oppen and howe," that is in tensile conversation with Of Being Numerous and Howe's work generally, particularly its interest in history.

Francois also read work engaged with Oppen. Of the selections from After Architecture, he says "the entire project was very much written under the influence of Oppen (especially Of Being Numerous and its poem "A Theological Definition"), Celan (mostly Fadensonnen, I think), Royet-Journoud and Esther Tellermann (whom I was translating at the time)."

Emily read from EXCLOSURES and from a prose piece that responded to questions posed by a friend, Tessa. Fabulous!

****Excerpt from
“A Closing Note in Favor of the Improbable”Emily Abendroth

TESSA:
Tell me what is
possible.

To
which a subsequent hour’s now altered version of oneself surmises:

At
this moment, I'm putting every wager on the prospect of constant reinvention while,
at the same time, making no claims as to our capacity for scale. I want to
acknowledge the craving that such a thing can happen and does happen, even if
not always or only very rarely as we imagine it for ourselves. Further, I want
to insist that it can happen without the demand for secession from everything
and everyone with whom one has lived and invented oneself previously, but
rather among them --- even perhaps by, with and under the careful shepherding,
husbandry and compañera-ship of their encouragements. That may be going too
far, I think, into the arena of wishes, into the impossible. One wish then is
that "going too far" is what is possible.

Another
wish is the fossil record itself - to cease hording it. Or at least to cease
believing that we are its only seasoned or valid specimens.

Originally from Strasbourg, France, françois luong lives in San Francisco. He has translated the works of Esther Tellermann, François Turcot, and Rémi Froger, as well as other francophone poets from France, Québec and elsewhere. His translations have appeared or are forthcoming in LIT, West Wind Review, Verse, Dandelion (Canada), Aufgabe, and elsewhere.

Robin sweats at Funky Door Yoga in camel and standing-head-to-knee pose, lives in San Francisco, and edits this blog. Her work has appeared in Little Red Leaves, mirage, HOW2, and elsewhere; an article on the work of Joan Retallack is forthcoming in Aufgabe.

Laura
Woltag lives in the East Bay, where she tends to things. Her work has
appeared in Try!, OMG! and is forthcoming in Mrs. Maybe and the
Manifest Reading Series anthology. She facilitates a listening/sound studies class through the Bay Area Public School.

The present: lack of actuals with excess fringe. The painting
looked better at the office. EBT doesn’t cover unregulated boner pills at the
corner store. Art du city trash is over! If you want it. This is the part where
I set the scene and talk about my feelings. Who are you window dressing for?

Democratic Vistas

We traded the agents for agency in order to speak from a great
height. But our voices diminished because they didn’t solve the food problem or
serve as a means of forgetting the food problem. And so we stepped down from
the height. No uncertain terms abounded but we could no longer adopt them. Our
totalized binaries felt like coin flips for who took care of the dock sex this
week – who pretended we took the puppy to the farm. Illustrate the scene with
like some dead leaves or something. Oh how we thought that we could lead if we could know!

Democratic Vistas

Appeals to reason lay fallow – it’s power having been subsumed by
the mores of long culture. God being unable to communicate in a single language
was lost. Heads bowed and remained in that position. The pervasive homeland
zeitgeist was still understood in terms of entitled scraps not belonging to or
dependent on a whole. Whales continued to sort of exist. But the ambience of
our security would destroy their brains.The cause gets lost in fashion.

Democratic Vistas

The cargo cults are waiting for the GIs to come back with the
goods. This would be humorous except for the widely held assumption that our
redemption resides in a body beyond our own. That the final leader is waiting
in the wings. That this final power could be known and interpreted. That a
singular translation could be disseminated by a shared media. That people
really want to live forever? In the summer after high school with their
parents?

Democratic Vistas

Teenage sass ruled the day and so we went in our corners.
Ancillary bright spots caroused in sweaty basements to the tuneless brays of
our feeble representatives. To destroy oneself with deafening sheets of noise.
To be absorbed by others in this destruction. To stink and to fall and to wail.
We had to perform our difference just to seem real. Though our positions were
left couched by this performance. That the terms of our discussion could not be
articulated without the caveat of our being freaks.

Democratic Vistas

The committee approves the ocean of lemonade, acquisition of new
moons. A tremulous affecting light surrounds the decision. In the evenings,
quiet reflective dinners with the family. Ciders exfoliating the day. We
ameliorate with collective hope. Opposition to the lemonade never existed.
Babies clean themselves.

Democratic Vistas

There were tortured glances across a flat gray field of the
undeservingly proud. We made eyes for the words refused to come. And when they
did, it was mostly as a whispered, “I know.” Dancing was encouraged but we
struggled (the boys would jump together or go too fast). Our bodies had never
been trained in cooperative aesthetics, rather those beyond the realm of sport.
Our bodies about math and faking it and lifting and dodgeball; our bodies about
skin crème and oxy pads.

Democratic Vistas

Unfinished developments of the late oughties bereft of teenage
bong smoke, finger sandwiches, hidden condoms, and hair dye. Suburban ruins as monuments
to themselves. That this crushing is not endlessly reproducible. Sacramento is
in remission and the pavement’s already warping. Torn Tyvek festooning the
battlements. No saving grace but a reason to say it. Proof that even though the
dream turns to your ex making out with your dad, you still get to wake up and
it was all just.

Democratic Vistas

After we learned to dance it was kinda scary. Like, no one could
keep their shirts on and we never ran out of booze. All that mojo that never
got out of our early 20s filling the room like vinegar stink. Like getting
whipped in the face by a sweat soaked Jerry curl. You didn’t know why but that
question was hella irrelevant by the time you asked. Sometimes jealousy and
better sense happened so we had to cut that shit out. But we got a commune in
the end.

Poet
Andrew Kenower curates the online audio archive A Voice Box and is co-curator of
the Woolsey Heights Reading Series. He is the principle designer for Trafficker
Press.

write it (thanks eddie) or wanting to step
to the other side of a diagram

“I stabbed afacing and came to relation it”

This is
textualthis is having a textual body inside other ones

we change
clothes to meet, a new sweater, articulate a space

in which to be someone who can be near they
are doing this now, but how to keep it straight, whose rehearsal is this? oh, greg’s –it’s easy to tell

It is always
okay to violate our terms, now

for
instance, kinesthetic vs. kinetic

a
panther/line or notebook is soup for what is outside you singing you

Whatever
is outside you is singing you always.

K. used
Busby Berkeley videos to make an anthem so the person

watching
could be Busby’s camera or eye, we are arranged around that or maybe the
surface of our body is one side of the glass platform, real and virtual
movements from diving girls sliding along us, but you have to leave room for
the audience to fail at watching, it is a glorious thing to walk into the
crowded

theater
in the afternoon, wrappers crackling

hits New
England again and again, I’m not

despair
saved for friends in letters on surrounding continents

all the
leaves in their exact copper scoured are

safe
nowwe’re practiced to keep

all these
months in the line

coming out of the movie theater in the afternoon

the sun
falling onto a used diagram

who is falling,
who is privileged to be a falling body

we can have
a falling body together

whatever
it is you have gazed at too long, goes first

I will go out into the world and
think of you, I
said

again and
again, I will gothen bearing gifts: a hat of the finest

blues, a dressing room mirror, some kind of
teabut I

don’t I don’t think of you, I think of what we had
made

or
scoured, of things on tables lit by lamps.I think

we practice
for years to get to a place we will be

by definition, contingent

I was pretty sure I could.

Laura Neuman is a poet and sometime performing artist living in Seattle.
She/xe is the author of a chapbook, The Busy Life (Gazing Grain Press,
2012). Some of hir poems can be
found in The Brooklyn Rail, EOAGH, Fact-Simile, & OmniVerse, and are included in the forthcoming
anthology, Troubling the Line (Nightboat
& EOAGH). In a former life in
a very different city from the one she lives in now, she was a co-conspirator &
performer with The Workshop for Potential Movement (www.potentiallymoving.org).